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Scientists discover new flora and fauna

Kim RobertsonUpdated
Mon 15 Nov 2010, 11:51 AM AEDT

A team of scientists is exploring the outback south of Coober Pedy, finding new species of animals and plants.

Transcript

IAN HENSCHKE, PRESENTER: Let's head to the outback now and a place called Bon Bon Station, which is just south of Cooperbedy. It's a harsh forbidding part of the State and that's probably why most South Australians have never heard of it.

It's also the focus for a group of scientists who are trying to secure the future for Australia's flora and fauna.

As Kim Robertson reports, they've discovered a whole new range of creatures.

KIM ROBERTSON, REPORTER: As the sun sets, scientists are still busy scouring the salt bush planes of Bon Bon Station Reserve covering more than 215,000 hectares it's the size of Sydney, but that's where the simiiarities end.

Its arid landscape is dotted with salt lakes, fresh water wetlands and beautiful expanses of acacia woodlands.

Good winter rains have transformed the desert sands which are erupting in life triggering the best survey conditions in more than a decade.

TIM RADFORD, BUSH HERITAGE AUSTRALIA: It's always a thrill when you're walking these track lines as you approach each one you don't really know what you're going to find so there's that little pulse of excitement each day.

KIM ROBERTSON: A team of 20 experts and volunteers were set the task of finding as many species of flora and fauna as they could. The survey is part of Bush Blitz a national program to document plants and animals in Australia's reserves.

The aim is to uncover some of the estimated 75 per cent of Australia's biodiversity that's yet to be discovered. These botanists collected over 450 plants on Bon Bon.

HELEN VONOW, DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENT: It's always a good opportunity to see something that perhaps hasn't been around for a while. That's the nature of arid systems is things come and go and then they come again.

KIM ROBERTSON: The former sheep station was purchased by the conservation organisation Bush Heritage Australia in 2008 with the help from state and federal governments.

Glenn Norris previously worked at the organisation's office in Melbourne, but these days his office looks a little different.

GLENN NORRIS, RESERVE MANAGER: We'd like to know what's here so we can start getting a picture of some long term outcomes, good, bad or otherwise, once we find species here that we see as a value to this landscape here, we'll look at managing the threats to those, which is predation by foxes and cats for example.

KIM ROBERTSON: Scientists say species are being lost in the arid lands before they can be fully catalogued and many traps are empty of the marsupials scientists hope to find.

After four days of surveying they strike gold and find a small marsupial in a pitfall trap.

The feisty dunnart is the first marsupial to be recorded on the property.

Statistics suggest we've been very poor stewards of our biodiversity, 28 mammals have become extinct across Australia, 17 of those are marsupials.

South Australia holds the world record for mammal extinction and desert mammals have been the hardest hit.

It's estimated that just one third of species here when Europeans arrived are now missing forever.

This survey aims to discover how many have managed to survive in an area that sheep had grazed for 130 years.

Back at the State Herbarium in Adelaide, Helen Vonow is cataloguing the 300 different plant species she found at the reserve to add to their collection of almost one million dried plants.

HELEN VONOW: My guess would be there's at least half as much or twice as many things again that you might get from that station.

That's a bit of a hard one to guess for sure.

But there would be things that because it was winter rains we wouldn't have got because they come up with summer rains.

KIM ROBERTSON: The samples are dried, identified and labelled before the information is entered into a database.

As scientists record the geographical location of each species, light is shone on what was once a black hole at the reserve.

HELEN VONOW: When we were out by the salt lake doing the filming the other day this was the little bright yellowy green thing that was lying flat on the ground, looked really cute.

Not so cute when it's dried, but we can see a whole lot from that, so we still know what the fruits look like. We've got lots of information about where it occurs.

KIM ROBERTSON: Insect abundance peaks at this time of year and the large volumes of vegetation have contributed to the high numbers.

Thousands of invertebrates were collected on the reserve through flight intercept traps and in ground water samples.

Scientists also found about 80 different species of native bees through netting of which about 25 are expected to be new.

Entomologists at Adelaide University have returned with almost too many insects to count.

They say sorting and cataloguing the thousands of bugs, spiders and other insects will take months.

Powerful cameras take magnified photos of the insects, which scientists can send to other experts for study and comparison.

GARY TAYLOR, UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE: They've already identified at least one new species.

This is one of the species of wasp that we found at Bon Bon.

We know that these species of wasps feed in the nests of native bees, where the native bees collect pollen and pack their nests with pollen and lay their eggs on it, but these wasps will then come in and lay their own eggs in the nests and feed on the pollen.

KIM ROBERTSON: Now scientists will begin the best part of the project describing, naming and allocating the new species to a family tree. The specimens collected from Bon Bon will become the holo type, the reference against which all other plants and animals will always be compared.

The information from the survey will be collated into a major report on the state of Australia's biodiversity, which reserve managers like Bush Heritage Australia will use as baseline data to protect biodiversity and hopefully stem extinction rates.

TIM RADFORD: We know that in some cases we've got a nice patch here, a nice productive patch and we can be the start, or help the bounce if you like and help some of these species repopulate, at least Bon Bon Reserve and potentially even other properties down the track.